Op 23/02/2021 om 12:48 schreef Bald Eagle:
> Thomas de Groot <tho### [at] degrootorg> wrote:
> 
>> Yes, I understand that, but my question (out of sheer curiosity) was
>> what, historically, 'POV-Ray 4' was intended to be. I guess it was the
>> next future version of POV, but the newsgroup 'pov4.discussion.general',
>> over the years, seems to be filled with unrelated topics. So, I wondered
>> how povr and hgpovray38 relate to that mythical pov4? Are they
>> intermediary steps or are they the intended as the 'real thing'? Just
>> idle questions from a guy who has nothing better to do ;-)
> 
> Well, unless someone can provide a clear and unambiguous historical answer, I'd
> say that whatever the intention was, it's lost to history.
> 
> I'd say that probably what we're looking for gets broken down into speed,
> reliability, and functionality.
> 
> So, then we make ourselves an outline, and start making entries under those
> headings.
> 
> 1. What can be made faster / what really NEEDS (realistically) to be faster?
> 2. What are the parts of POV-Ray that are unstable/unreliable?
> 3. And functionality -
> which I think can be broken down into 3 parts
>    A. programming / math - because as much as POV-Ray is a renderer,
>       it primarily relies on SDL code to generate the content
>       So, data types/containers, algorithms, mathematical functions
> 
>    B. scene assembly / modeling
>       this can be split up into geometry and texturing,
>       and of course we have other things like camera, lighting, etc
>       ...and the parser.
> 
>    C. rendering
>       Likely much of this will be things like ray-object intersections
>       and related things that Bill Pokorny is up to his eyeballs in
> 
> 
> clipka had some things to say about some of this here:
> 
>
http://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3C49ca3d4e%241%40news.povray.org%3E/?mtop=305193&moff=10
> 
> So maybe one single thread can be set aside to post nothing but the barest
> descriptive entries, with a meta-thread dedicated to commentary and discussion.
> The we can see where we're at, and where it would be productive for people to go
> and do.
> 
> Plus, it would provide an easy list to refer to when sifting through the forums
> for code that already accomplishes (mostly) what is on the wish list.
> 
> Because 4.0 was supposed to be a break from the slow bureaucratic suicide of
> backwards-compatibility - so since we're the only ones using POV-Ray, and HERE,
> guess who decides what 4.0, if it's ever going to get made, will be?
>

Right! Very clear indeed; I didn't remember that post by Christoph and 
he says some very fundamental things too. I need to ponder this a bit 
more...

-- 
Thomas

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